A Coruna, Spain

April 30, 2024 - Today we arrived in A Corona, our final stop in Spain since Barcelona was removed from our revised itinerary. Today was a cold, cloudy and windy day, with an occasional shower, but still was a fabulous day. Today was our last long tour, a 7 hour trip to see Cape Finisterre, Costa da Morte and the village of Muxia. Our first stop was at the Cape, known as the “medieval end of the earth”, which has a lighthouse overlooking the Atlantic Ocean that is still in use today. This is also one of the end points of the “Way of St. James”. Many pilgrims, after reaching Santiago de Compostela, continued to finish their pilgrimage here at Cape Finisterre. We saw, on the rocks, the statue of a hiking boot, as well as a cross on which pilgrims leave stones marking them “leaving their past sins behind” and starting their life anew after the pilgrimage. It was a beautiful vista! From there we continued to Costa da Morte, where there is the church dedicated to “our lady of the boat”. Here there are many memorials to the sailors lost of the years to rough waters of the Atlantic. The scenery as we traveled through this area was absolutely breath taking. We also passed many old farms with “graineries”, brick and stone structures, that were built to hold the grains harvested by the farmers. Today they re built of wood, but the old stone ones are now protected and it is against the law to destroy them.

Our final stop was at the Paradora hotel in Muxia for a wonderful lunch of gazpacho, fish soup, and Iberian pork. After a wonderful meal, we all enjoyed a siesta and/or quiet site seeing on the bus ride back to our ship.

Final Sea Day, Spain to France

Porto, Portugal